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Comment by jumblesale | Hacker News Reader

That's really bleak. I wonder what kind of disease can kill you in 30 days but otherwise leave you well enough to write and travel? It doesn't sound like he has a history of anything. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing and could hazard a guess?

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One of my family members has just discovered he has pancreatic cancer. It usually has an extremely poor prognosis because it is often caught too late and the disease has already spread to other organs. 1 year survival rate is 25%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreatic_cancer

If true my educated guess for the disease would be a form of leukemia, although in its acute form is unlikely that the affected are left well enough to travel.

Brain tumors can be very quick, that would be my guess

He writes that his wife is worried for his liver (Day 3, I think). Maybe he has Hepatitis C?

Edit: Well, this shows that I'm not a doctor. I have no idea if Hepatitis C can kill as quickly as this. Maybe he was diagnosed very late and his malady already is at its final stage?

I don't think she's worried ... I got that as her making a joke.

> He writes that his wife is worried for his liver

lol no! you lost something in translation...

I'm French. She says it because of the wine, but maybe it has to do with his illness? Maybe not...

It reads to me as a dark joke by repeating a common caution that is now completely irrelevant. Note the "Je ris" ("I laughed" for the non-French speakers) immediately afterwards. I'm presuming that's what kome think you missed.

It's meant as a joke. As a wife who is worried about his health, although irrelevant in his current state, continues to pretend having a normal life.

Such sentence is very common in my (Belgian) entourage.

This is also why he adds he is smiling.

Yeah, I totally missed the sarcastic tone. I just thought she was making the joke on his actual illness, not the possibility of having another illness due to wine abuse.

Alcohol has been linked to pancreatic cancer

it might be because he was ill some time before it was discovered.

Cancer can kill quickly but doctors rarely give specific timelines, at least in the US. "30 days" seems suspicious, if only because most doctors hate giving specific amounts of time. (If the person lives half as long, then the family gets angry because they thought there was more time. If the person lives much longer-- sometimes an order of magnitude more, given the complexities of misdiagnosis, new treatments, etc.-- then there's a different kind of blowback.)

I would guess that it's metastatic cancer. Mentioning the liver is an indication. Once the liver's involved, cancer gets very hard to treat. Typical chemotherapy is killing the cancer by flooding the body with poison, and doing that when the liver's compromised is often fruitless (and painful).

Most likely, the doctors have stopped treatment, in which case 30 days is a reasonable median, but he'll be essentially functional until the last 2 weeks. However, there are cases (although they're quite rare) of people living for months or even years after that happens. Spontaneous remission is uncommon (less than 1%) but it does occur. That's yet another reason why doctors don't like giving specific timelines.

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